The history of Earth Day, as a holiday, is very brief. The first Earth Day was in 1970. In the scriptures, however, the first Earth Day was a long time ago – Day 3 of Creation. After Genesis, the scriptures have much to say about Creation and our relationship to it, and to each other.
Romans 1:20 says “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”
In Luke 19:40 Jesus said that if his disciples keep quiet about his glory “the stones will cry out.”
Yet, one passage that is especially relevant for the world in 2022 is Colossians 1:16-17: “For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about that verse, and that last line “in Him all things hold together” but first I want to offer some context.
As Reverend Edie knows, my wife Kimberly and I didn’t necessarily buy 62 acres to become farmers or environmental experts. I don’t have much of an ag background. I’m just a suburban kid who grew up on the wrong side of the golf course. Kimberly, who grew up in a state park, has more outdoorsy credibility than I do. In fact, three years ago, I didn’t know the difference between straw and hay. I do now. Trust me, if I got it wrong, our goats, Jeff and Dill, would let me know.
The truth is we bought a Civil War era farm because we felt a calling to be ministers of reconciliation, and hospitality. We had both lived overseas. Kimberly worked in Haiti and the Middle East, and I had done development work in post-war former Yugoslavia. We were seeing in our own country the divisions, alienation and tribalism that tore other countries apart, and we both understood, and had experienced, the power of place, which is inseparable from Creation. In a broken and alienated world, place can be providential, a setting for divine intervention and healing.
In the midst of setting up such a place – and a project we’re calling the Fairlight Forum – I had the opportunity to launch an organization focused on environmental stewardship with a former Department of Energy official. The more engaged I became on both efforts, and in managing my own land, the more I realized the visible ecosystem of the natural world in many ways mirrors the invisible ecosystem of the heart, mind and soul. And that In Christ all things hold together. And without Him, all things fall apart.
MLK had this in mind when he said:
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be … This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
So, as a church – I mean the universal church of the Nicene Creed, the fellowship of believers – we have an opportunity, through the modern focus on Earth Day, to make these connections and offer a prophetic voice to a divided world searching for meaning and belonging.
A prophetic voice is not a foretelling or predictive voice but a forthtelling voice that speaks truth, not just through words, which ought to be winsome, but through love and sacrificial acts of service and stewardship.
The conventional wisdom today is that traditional faith is in decline. Pew research releases a poll every few years that shows that we are increasingly live in the age of “nones.” That’s N.O.N.E.S not catholic nuns N.U.N. The “nones” are the religiously unaffiliated or the “none of the above” when asked to identify their faith – 23 percent of Americans now fit into that camp.
What I’ve observed, however, is not that people are less religious, but that they’re religious about other things. One of those things is the environment. That makes a lot of sense. It’s normal to look at the natural world with wonder, to care deeply about its condition and to ask if there’s more to the story. So, as a church, why not connect some dots on a secular holiday like Earth Day that raises profoundly spiritual questions.
The 17th century theologian and mathematician Blaise Pascal said we all express a “craving and helplessness” to fill an “infinite abyss” that can only be filled by God himself. In other words, we have a God shaped vacuum. In the 1950’s Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said we have a religious instinct. Jung said the new communist regimes that boasted “God is dead” hadn’t killed God but replaced God with other gods, namely the state.
Today, our religious instinct is being expressed through tribalism, partisanship, theologized ideology and various “isms” – nationalism, irredentism (dreams of lost imperial glory), environmentalism, conservatism, liberalism and so on. With some of those “isms” it’s hard to find anything redemptive but some contain great insights. People of good faith can disagree about ideology, but the church sacrifices its redemptive, prophetic voice when it takes sides and joins the crowd that is bowing to the same false god from opposite sides of the altar.
Instead of making an idol out of ideology or bowing to any “ism”, we should bow to Jesus and answer the hardest questions with confidence and integrity. It is possible – and essential – to balance God’s command to care for the poor and lift people out of poverty while being good stewards of Creation.
We can also bow to Jesus while being completely unafraid of pursuing science, and being obedient to Jesus’ command to love God with our minds. If all things hold together in Christ, He is the end of inquiry and the destination of any pursuit of truth.
In my work I’ve been blessed to work with not just the top policymakers and business leaders in the world but also world’s best climate scientists. Climate science is really about physics, and physics on very small and very large scales points to something holding all things together. On the small – quantum mechanics – scale, the leading theory of reality is called string theory. The math of string theory says there are 11 dimensions – 7 beyond what we can perceive – and that every particle that makes up every atom that makes up everything we see is the manifestation of vibrating strings. Just as strings on a guitar can produce certain notes, strings at the quantum scale manifest the building blocks of matter. In real sense, the universe is a symphony and God is the conductor. It’s no wonder that music moves us.
On a large scale we see wonders as well. The recently launched James Webb space telescope is looking back at the beginning of time and a story that looks very similar to Genesis Chapter 1, when something came from nothing.
But if all things hold together in Jesus the final proof for a hurting, broken and curious world may be in the garments of Creation, the outer layer of Christ’s ordered reality we barely understand, something called beauty.
Who can argue against the beauty of the natural world, which we see every day in Pleasant Valley? This is what inspired Russian author Dostoevsky to have a protagonist declare, “I believe beauty will save the world.”
In his Nobel lecture in 1970 Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to make sense of this statement. He said:
Dostoyevsky once let drop an enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What is this? For a long time it seemed to me simply a phrase. How could this be possible? When in the bloodthirsty process of history did beauty ever save anyone, and from what? Granted, it ennobled, it elevated—but whom did it ever save?
There is, however, a particular feature in the very essence of beauty … a true work of art is completely irrefutable; it prevails even over a resisting heart.
Solzhenitsyn said that when trees of Truth and Goodness are cut down, as often feels like the case today, Beauty can fill the gap. He understood that a true work of art like Creation carries its verification within itself.
My hope and prayer around Earth Day is that we can be dissidents – in the world but not of the world and unafraid to stand apart because we’re first citizens of a different Kingdom. From that Kingdom we can be ambassadors of reconciliation and stewards of a world both seen and unseen. In Christ all things hold together. C.S. Lewis put it well: When we pursue Heaven, we get Earth thrown in.